National Endowment For The Arts

"Modern society works fervently to put vulgarity within the reach of everyone." -Nicolas Gomez-Davila

For years the agency persisted in awarding cash grants to artists bent on insulting and scandalizing the public. What did they imagine would happen when the public started finding out how its money was being spent? -Jeff Jacoby

Found out, for example, about "Piss Christ" (Andres Serrano's NEA-funded photographs of a crucifix submerged in his urine)?

Or about "Four Scenes in a Harsh Life" (Ron Athey's NEA-funded performance that involves slicing a man's back with a scalpel, soaking up the blood on paper towels and dangling them above the audience)?

Or "Annie Sprinkle: Post-Porn Modernist" (the New York Kitchen Theater's NEA-funded show by pornographist Sprinkle, who masturbated on stage with sex toys, inserted a speculum into her vagina and called up audience members to examine her cervix with a flashlight)?

Or Artists Space (the NEA-funded gallery whose exhibits included "What is the Proper Way to Display a US Flag," which required viewers to walk across an American flag on the floor)?

-Jeff Jacoby, How the NEA pollutes American culture

CONTROVERSIAL photographer Andres Serrano is again using his bodily excreta in his sickening "art."

The provocateur caused a stir in 1989 when he received money from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts for "P - - s Christ," his photo of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of his own urine. Now Serrano's top-secret show, coming to the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Chelsea, features his own feces and is titled "[Bleep]: An Investigation."

The National Endowment for the Arts is spending $30,000 for a series of dance performances, including Doggie Hamlet. The "conceptual art" features actors yelling and running at sheep in a field in Vermont. Dartmouth College received the funding in the latest round of NEA grants released this month.

Doggie Hamlet involves several actors joining in a field to scare sheep and walk around wearing sheepskins.

The National Endowment for the Arts gave $60,000 for the production of a play about the first openly gay president of the United States who has to fight zombies in the basement, and who has a cheating First Man...

“The year is 2063 and Thom Valentine, the first openly gay President of the United States, faces a host of problems,” reads the Woolley Mammoth Theater Company’s description of the play. “An imminent civil war, the threat of an African invasion, an adulterous First Gentleman, and zombies in the basement of the White House!”

Piss Christ is a 1987 photograph by artist and photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's urine.

The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition,[1] which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects. A print of the photograph was damaged using a screwdriver or icepick on April 17, 2011 while on exhibit in Avignon, France.

Chairman Alexander warns that "our nation would surely be the poorer" without the NEA and contends "that the system that the endowment has for judging is very sound."

Well, if Annie Sprinkle's gynecology lessons and Robert Mapplethorpe's rectal probes and the Whitney Museum's displays of vomit and menstrual blood have enriched our nation's culture and deepened our understanding of art, she may be right.

Current Communist Goals as revealed by Dr. Cleon Skousen in The Naked Communist, written in 1958 and read into the Congressional Record in 1963:

...

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”

In 1989, Sen. Jesse Helms drew attention to the NEA's practice of funding stunningly offensive "art" -- Robert Mapplethorpe's photos of himself being penetrated rectally by a bullwhip, for example, or Andres Serrano's images of a crucified Jesus submerged in urine, or Annie Sprinkle masturbating with sex toys before live audiences. The controversy Helms triggered is ongoing, and the public's scorn for the NEA has been noted in Congress.

Sadly, you can't talk about the National Endowment of the arts without bringing up sodomy and piss.

Although the NEA has awarded more than 100,000 grants and only a few have been controversial, the hottest NEA topic is whether or not the federal government is promoting high art or abetting "child pornographers" such as photographer Mapplethorpe and hiring "blasphemers" in the likes of Serrano to pee on Jesus.

But some of the NEA's grants are spicing up more than the economy. A few of their more risque choices have some taxpayer advocates hot under the collar, including a $50,000 infusion for the Frameline film house, which recently screened Thundercrack, "the world's only underground kinky art porno horror film, complete with four men, three women and a gorilla."

According to the 1965 law that created the arts endowment, "encouragement of excellence" is to be the No. 1 criterion for awarding grants. By now it should be obvious to all that excellence is the last thing the NEA is interested in promoting.

A new website on prison poetry was launched this week with assistance from a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Prisonpoetryworkshop.org debuted online this week and features readings of poems written by incarcerated inmates. Among the titles available to listen to on the site are: “Ghetto Bastard”, “Fenced Jewels” and “A Gangster’s Prayer”.

For over a decade as a theatre artist, my salary was made possible by taxpayers funding the arts. To be sure, some of that money was made possible by private grants and, I guess, through monies raised at the box office. But, let's be honest, without the taxpayers footing a hefty portion of the bill, I wouldn't have been able to make as little money as I did make.

In hindsight, and after much reflection and a better understanding of economics, I am truly sorry, and ask the taxpayer to forgive my thievery. However, spilled milk can't be put back into the bottle. That doesn't mean that we have to keep spilling the milk, though.

It's way past time to defund and shutter the National Endowment for the Arts. -John Ellis